Plug-ins

GravityForms received a feature request two years ago to add the ability to change the description location on the forms from below the input boxes. Instead of putting it AFTER the field, the request was to place the box description above them.

Last year, they listed it as a future feature, but as of version 1.6.9, (today) this feature is still not available. They do still have this on their list for a future release, but in the mean time, this can be accomplished by adding a piece of code to your theme’s header.php.

To move the description from this location:

To this location:

Place this code in your theme’s header.php just before the </header> tag:

After you’ve added this code, you should take a few minutes to view your site in a browser that you can easily see if there are any javascript errors, such as Internet Explorer.

If adding the above code causes any conflicts with your other plugins or custom theme code, you will see a yellow error warning in the bottom left corner of Internet Explorer.

Remember too, that this change could cause your other plugins or custom code to stop working. If that happens, just remove the above code you added or if you’re more experienced with working with your plugins and code, you can try to adjust the conflicting plugin(s) or code.

*** Update 2014 – At some point this became a non-issue since the feature was added to WP. However, if you don’t see the option to relocate the description, see the very last comment for my guess why.

Tip on some steps: Before creating or editing files such as abspath.php or cforms.js, change your local directory to a folder named after the site you’re working on. This will help prevent accidental uploading of these edited files for one site onto another, which will cause the forms to stop working. Having these for backup for each site worked on also comes in handy.

1. Before beginning, be sure you have the latest cForms downloaded and unzipped from Delicious Days.

2. FTP to the plugins directory of the site, download a full backup copy of cForms.

3. Do a database backup in the wp-admin, if you haven’t already done it.

4. Deactivate cForms.

5. Upload the new cforms folder through ftp. (Be sure you are uploading the cforms folder and not the zip file name – this will cause cforms to have errors and partially work.)

6. Leave the ftp on for now – activate cForms again.

7. Go to the cForms admin page.

8. Does it say: It appears that cforms was not able to create abspath.php…?
If it does, start a new text file. Copy the green highlighted code cForms produced.
Looks like: <code>&lt;?php $abspath = ‘/home/www/domain-name.com/'; ?&gt;</code>
Paste that code into your new text file and save as abspath.php.
Upload that file to the cforms folder.

9. Refresh the cforms admin page to be sure it’s correct now.

10. If you see more notations at the top, such as upgrade database table, just follow the instructions. This isn’t as common anymore unless you’re upgrading a very old installation.

11. Final step: test one of the forms.

Failed tests:

1. Did you add the abspath.php file and is the path on that correct? If the installation is in a sub-directory, check to see that cforms recognized that and the sub-directory is showing at the end of the file path in abspath.php.

2. If cforms didn’t tell you to add the abspath.php file, check that it’s actually in the cforms folder anyway. If not, create one using the above code with the correct server path.

3. Is the cforms folder it’s own? In the plugins directory, when you open the cforms folder, do you see files or another cforms folder? If you see another cforms folder, you will have to open it, select all the files and folders, and drag them up one directory.

4. Follow this path in your ftp: cforms/js/. Download the cforms.js file and open for editing.
Just past the copyright information, look for this line:
<code>var sajax_uri = ‘/wp-content/plugins/cforms/lib_ajax.php';</code>

If the wordpress installation is in a sub-directory, add it to the code like this:
<code>var sajax_uri = ‘/sub-directory-name/wp-content/plugins/cforms/lib_ajax.php';</code>

It may be common knowledge or common sense, but here’s a quick Q & A on the new built-in upgrade feature of Word Press 2.7 and up.

Starting with 2.7 I typically deactivate and delete the automatic upgrade plugin after upgrade. But mostly of curiosity I left one on when upgrading to 2.7.1.

Question:
Should I definitely deactivate and delete the automatic upgrade plugin once upgrading to 2.7? Will it make a difference leaving it on?

Answer:
Yes. At the least it must be deactivated. It will cause an error during the attempt to auto upgrade if the plugin is still active. This won’t cause damage to your blog, but the upgrade will not work until you have deactivated the plugin.

This feature now being built-in to Word Press is very nice though. It skips several tedious steps from the the previous automatic upgrade plugin.

No Automatic Backup:
One important thing to remember though, you definitely need a database backup plugin now. It no longer takes you through the steps for backup during the upgrade.

I recommend WordPress Database Backup. It works very well, simple to use, and have used it myself to restore lost or corrupt databases with 100% success. This plugin also has automatic backup, which I highly rercommend taking the few seconds to set.

There’s a really great plug-in that was made that allows the authors to have a profile page. One huge problem with it though, is that if the author has a long biography, it all runs together in one paragraph.

We’ve been using it in several places for quite awhile now and although it recognizes standard .html for making links, nothing we did would force manual linebreaks. It was REALLY irritating and quite unprofessional looking.

Over on Lorele’s blog I found a suggestion but I couldn’t get that working either so I posted on the actual plug-in page. Finally, things slowed down enough that I asked Heather, our #1 programmer to try and figure it out and she was able to.

It turns out that the plug-in itself has to be edited, and rather than explain it here I’ll just place a version of the edited plug in.

The process of upgrading your WordPress used to be a tedious one. You had to manually backup all of your files, download them deactivate all your plug-ins upload the new version run the upgrade

Assuming that everything went okay, you then had to manually reactivate all of your plug-ins. I went through the step by step WordPress upgrade using a video on my main blog, and even though it was fairly straightforward it still took up too much of my time.

Thanks to a plug-in that was released last summer the process is now seamless and can be completed in under 60 seconds.

This video demonstrates the entire process from start to finish and is not so much a tutorial, as it is a quick demonstration of an amazing plug-in that’s made our lives much easier.

Changing the permalinks structure on an existing WordPress blog can be dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Once you have an established URL structure, a change can cause you to not only lose search engine visibility, but all of your PageRank will drop to zero, and all of your inbound links will no longer work. That can’t be good!

Additionally, if all of the page names in the search engines index cease to exist, then anyone that ever clicks on one of your Serps would be taken to a 404 error. That’s bad!

Sometimes there’s a lot of legitimate reason to want to change, usually because they were set up in correctly in the first place. The proper way to make change would be to implement real one redirects for every single URL that’s changing. This can be quite the daunting task.

Luckily there is a plug-in available to make this process painless. It’s called Dean’s Permalinks Migration, and here’s a three-minute video to show you how it works…

Downloading and uploading files for WordPress upgrades takes a little while, and the manual upgrade process can be somewhat tedious. That’s why frequently, WordPress installations get ignored until they are far out of date.

I ran across a plug-in last night that was absolutely amazing, and I just tried it this morning – It’s called the WordPress automatic upgrade.

I just upgraded a blog from an older version 2.2, to a new version 2.31 in under three minutes total.

I downloaded the plug-in, uploaded to the plug-ins directory, activated, and then clicked the link inside the description of the plug-in to begin.

It automatically deactivates and reactivates your plug-ins during the install, and backs up the files for download too, before the upgrade takes place.

For some reason, the “automated version” failed, but manually clicking next, next, next, had me completed in under three minutes, including downloading the backup file.

There’s really no FTP time either up or down, because the server goes directly to WordPress.org to get the latest version. This is totally awesome, and this plug-in needs to become a part your standard upload.

Keep in mind of course that any plug-ins that don’t work with the new versions are going to delete you screwed and force a manual upgrade, but the new plug-in page from WordPress 2.3x on will now automatically tell you when a plug-in is out of date. Try it for yourself…